41–50 of 363 posts
Some of these people get so full of themselves and treat the pages they are interested in like their own little fiefdoms that no-one else is allowed to touch.
> For instance, the level of conflict on discussion pages, as assessed by raters, has been shown to negatively correlate with the quality of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. An alternative explanation is that "toxic comments" protect wikipedia from low quality content, acting as defense mechanism against bad editors. So without better study which tries to analyze if the critique (regardless of toxicity) is justi…
And then there are the many talk sections I've seen where a petty editor plays the nuh-uh/yeah-huh game.
I'd contribute to Wikipedia, but I have no energy to bicker with people who are going to play with definitions or semantics just to make articles reflect their world view.
They constantly harass you, and they invent rules if needed to get articles down that they don’t like.
edit: Misunderstood TFA. Leaving the original comment. ~~On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on Wikipedia were from an editor.~~
> On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on Wikipedia were from an editor. Isn't everyone an editor on Wikipedia? By definition, you need to be an editor in order to leave comments. Who other than editors would leave toxic comments?
They see an article that needs correction or a small expansion so they create the account and do the work.
Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
A few hours later the editor adds their work back, but under their own name.
Add community notes
It's not that I take it personally, because I realize that no one cared to review the edits before reversion. It's just that "be bold" in the sense that it's applied by me in combination with how it's applied by overprotective bots (maybe?) or at worst diligent but careless editors is a massive waste of time and energy. So I've stopped contributing altogether.
About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV personality and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast. Seems noteworthy enough to me, but what do I know.
A couple months ago I tried to create a page on a local tractor company that used to be really important to my hometowns economy. There was an existing section about the company on one of their specific tractors pages. I used that with its citations as the basis for the new page.
I did scan the citations and they seemed fine. I even fixed one that was broken with a wayback machine link. What I didn’t do was read them word for word. Well turns out multiple sections of the text I had moved from the tractors page were straight up lifted from their sources. Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone else did read my citations word for word, and it was marked for “rapid deletion for copyright infringement”. No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn’t have a local copy of the article.
It was particularly frustrating because the moved text only accounted for about 20% of the page by the time I was done.
Beyond that the history of my author page is now marked with a copyright infringement warning that if I do it again I’ll be banned.
I don’t think I want to play in their sandbox anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, the only toxic comments I experienced on Wikipedia were from an editor. Isn't everyone an editor on Wikipedia? By definition, you need to be an editor in order to leave comments. Who other than editors would leave toxic comments?
This hasn’t really been true for years. Most new editors have experienced like this: They see an article that needs correction or a small expansion so they create the account and do the work. Their work is immediately reverted by an editor. A few hours later the editor adds their work back, but under their own name.
> Their work is immediately reverted by an editor.
My 2 day wikipedia career in a nutshell, I guess I'm not alone.
Gave up looking for a clear definition of what a "toxic comment" is. All I found is a statement that they use some score from some tool and link to the tool developer's site so I'm required to sift through the developer's site to understand what the core part of the paper is, or I've missed some other part of the paper because they include so many dense paragraphs of nothing useful informations (as well as a nice pro…
Dead comments fall into a few categories: trolling, advertisements, conspiracy/culture war and toxic.
It's pretty easy to figure out which is which.